This is a blog that I started in october 2010, mainly for discussing my ideas on the economy, taxation and politics. Please add comments - I'll do my best to reply. If you are new, I would recommend watching one of my YouTube presentations (in French or English). You can download a fully indexed pdf version (over 600 pages) here.

22 Mar 2014

Financial transactions in Australia up 5.3% to 135 trillion Australian Dollars

My thanks to Susy for pointing me to the latest Australian Financial Markets Report for 2013. You can download their nice glossy report or you can download all the data in an Excel file here. It's very nicely done, and allowed me to generate the following table very easily.

As you can see, total financial transactions were up 5.3% to reach an impressive 135 trillion Australian Dollars. That's a 37.3% increase since 2008-9. Nearly two thirds of the total (64.5%) involves Debt Markets, with 32.3% involving the Currency Markets. A mere 3% involves Equities.

That total number of $135 trillion is 89 times Australian GDP (currently 1.521 trillion). Even more impressively, it's 346 times higher that the amount raised by all the existing taxes in Australia (390.1 billion in 2011-12).

It follows that Australia could potential eliminate all the existing taxes with a Financial Transaction Tax of under 0.3% if it was applied to all financial transactions - a number close to the one I was suggesting back in 2012.

It also reassures me to learn that the potential for using an FTT is still clearly there. Go for it Australia!